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Blue Skies and Blue-Chip Sales at Art Basel Miami

MIAMI BEACH — Wind, rain and even snow left some collectors making the pilgrimage to Art Basel Miami Beach stranded for hours at airports in New York and Europe. But here, except for a few showers on Wednesday afternoon, the sun shone brightly, as if to demonstrate how much the little strip of South Beach, which each December becomes the setting for an art-world bacchanalia of buying, selling and socializing, is a place apart from the rest of the country, where unemployment and financial anxiety linger.

“The art market is back!” was the chorus this week among most of the major dealers at the fair, even though some combination of canceled flights and the new economic reality kept the number of attendees down from prefinancial crisis years. Many dealers had come feeling cautiously optimistic after November’s successful auctions, but they were thrilled to see the new buoyancy playing out in the fair, and, in many cases, were eager to boast about it.

“I could have sold almost everything twice,” said an elated if slightly exhausted-looking Marc Glimcher, of Pace Gallery, on Wednesday, a few hours into the fair, which runs through Sunday. “Everyone’s fighting over the de Kooning,” he added with a grin, referring to a bronze sculpture, identical to one owned by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, on display at the Pace booth at the convention center here, where the fair is taking place. He predicted that several prospective buyers would be disappointed and that he would have to take the blame, a possibility he seemed to relish more than dread. After all, a tug-of-war could not be more gratifying to the gallery, which just signed de Kooning’s estate in September.

Mr. Glimcher chatted on about the gallery’s bright prospects, volunteering, without being asked, that he couldn’t “confirm or deny” rumors that Pace would open a space in London soon, in addition to another possible one in Shanghai. (Pace currently has galleries in New York and Beijing.)

The general sense seemed to be that while many people in the United States and Europe were struggling financially, some were doing very well, and a good number of them went to the fair with their wallets open. As one dealer put it, “Money is being made, and it wants to be spent.”

Photo

Julian Zugazagoita and Catherine L. Futter, center, enjoy Ernesto Neto’s installation “Circleprototemple...!” at the Miami Beach Convention Center.Credit
Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

Several collectors voiced the same view. “The traffic is not overwhelming, but I think the quality of the people is good,” said William L. Mack, the chairman of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, before turning away to greet the former Guggenheim trustee Peter M. Brant.

In some areas of the fair, other perspectives could be heard. Martin Klosterfelde, of Klosterfelde Gallery in Berlin, sat in a quiet booth on Thursday afternoon. He said that he had sold some pieces, but that the weather and flight cancellations had made for a slow first day. In any case, he added, “It’s a buyer’s market now, so people have time to think,” meaning that business is spread out over the four days of the fair rather than just the first two hours, which used to be a mad rush of speculation.

Vladimir Ovcharenko, of Regina Gallery in Moscow, in his third year at the fair, said that while business had improved each year, the Miami fair was still a challenge for a Russian gallery.

“For us, it’s tough,” he said. He mimed a fairgoer glancing up at the sign on his booth. “People see Moscow gallery, they think, ‘Eh, it’s a bad country,’ ” he said.

“It’s not so big business,” he continued, explaining that for him Art Basel was more about meeting collectors and introducing the Russian art scene. For that same purpose, Mr. Ovcharenko is among the dealers behind a new art fair that will open in Moscow on Dec. 17, called Cosmoscow.

Latin American galleries, on the other hand, seemed to be thriving. That’s not unusual, given Miami’s geographical proximity and the fact that many Latin American collectors have homes here, but what was new this year was the level of interest in Latin American art from museums.

Anne Strauss, an associate curator in the 19th century, Modern and contemporary department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was at the fair on Wednesday specifically to look at Latin American art, and she was apparently not the only museum representative doing so. The Mexican gallery kurimanzutto sold a Jonathan Hernández collage to the Miami Art Museum, and a sculpture by Abraham Cruzvillegas was reserved for another American institution, according to the gallery owners.

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Visitors at the Gagosian booth at the Miami Beach Convention Center, which featured work by Jeff Koons, foreground and right, and Christopher Wool, left.Credit
Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

The booth of the Brazilian gallery Fortes Vilaça was dominated by a large installation by the artist Ernesto Neto. A rounded wooden structure raised slightly off the ground, wrapped in red nylon, it looked a little like Cinderella’s carriage after midnight, if it had turned into a strawberry instead of a pumpkin. Inside the sculpture, titled “Circleprototemple ...!,” a bench encircled a large drum, over which dangled a hefty drumstick. The work was first exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in London this year. Alessandra Ragazzo d’Aloia, one of the gallery’s owners, said she hoped it would go to a Brazilian museum.

In the meantime, however, the sculpture made an attractive resting place for tired fairgoers and, over the course of the fair, it hosted a shifting party of people chatting in English, Spanish and Portuguese. On Thursday evening the artist himself arrived, straight off a long flight from São Paolo but still in impish spirits, and held court inside his “temple,” where he played the drum vigorously in between otherwise uninterrupted streams of conversation.

Mr. Neto explained that the work was inspired by a Jorge Luis Borges short story, “The Circular Ruins,” and that the red structure was meant to be a heart, with the drum providing the heartbeat. Then (prodded by a reporter’s questions) he went into a long and hilariously animated discussion of his next project in Rio de Janeiro — a series of projections of photographs he has taken, many of them of his friends — and of the difficult logistics of planning the accompanying late-night beach party.

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Apart from encounters like these, artists often seem marginal to the social scene at a blue-chip fair like Art Basel Miami Beach, which is dominated by dealers, collectors and museum trustees, who use these four days to reinforce their business and personal relationships at often opulent dinners and parties. (Artists are a bigger presence at the satellite fairs.)

A “family reunion where you get to pick all your relatives” is how one collector described the fair — an accurate enough statement, except that it ignores the millions of dollars changing hands within the family.

One family member who had changed roles was Jeffrey Deitch, the former New York art dealer who this year made the unusual transition from art dealer to museum director. As usual, on the opening night of the fair he gave a party on the beach at the Raleigh Hotel, where he danced to the band LCD Soundsystem.

“I was always central to Miami,” Mr. Deitch, who now runs the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, had said earlier in the day, confessing that he was “nostalgic” for his years as a dealer there. “They didn’t even replace my booth — it’s a group of benches now.”

Correction: December 7, 2010

A picture caption on Saturday with an article about the Art Basel Miami Beach art show misspelled the surname of a curator at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., who was shown inside an installation at the Miami Beach Convention Center. She is Catherine L. Futter, not Fetter.

A version of this article appears in print on December 4, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Blue Skies and Blue-Chip Sales at Art Basel Miami. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe